UML-profile for multimedia software architectures

Multimedia technology is increasingly being used to create reliable and effective communication environments. However, the design of multimedia applications is currently driven more by intuition than by empirically or theoretically derived design guidelines. In a multimedia application, the software architecture is defined as a set of components manipulating various multimedia data types with specific constraints that we must take into consideration at the architectural design. For instance, the problem of heterogeneity related to the exchanged of multimedia data flows. In the absence of prescriptive architectural design principles, meta-model for multimedia software architecture (MMSA) enables the description of software architectures expressing a multimedia software system as a collection of components which handle various types and formats of multimedia data, and interacts between them via adaptation connectors. This paper proposes a modelling of architectural elements such as: multimedia, application components, communication, etc. and an UML profile for verification and validation of MMSA architectures and detection of heterogeneities between components communicating with multimedia flows.